October is flying by in the Super Kids classroom! Our routines for reader’s and math workshop have been established and the kids are diving deep into activities that help develop their literacy and number sense. I often get asked how families can help with this process. Reading to your child is the number one recommendation I have. Kids need to hear what reading sounds like. Pause and make predictions, ask about the characters, summarize the story together. Take time to enjoy the topics and book series your child loves.
To help develop number sense…play games with your kids. Help them develop their sense of larger and smaller numbers. Dice patterns, card games, and a simple game of snakes and ladders can be used to help develop these skills. For example landing on a number and having to say the number. What’s one more? What’s one less? What’s ten more? What’s ten less? How many groups of ten are in the number? Is it even or odd? For more of a challenge try the game of Yahtzee!
Below are a few pictures of our class hard at work developing these skills.
Some Super Kids couldn’t stop reading and asked to take the new Dog Man classroom book outside at recess. I was on duty and had to capture the moment. 🙂
Scientist use their five senses to see their world, ask questions, conduct experiments, and make observations. The Super Kids practiced asking questions when they conducted an investigation using pea pods. One Super Kid brought pea pods as part of their lunch and another asked how many peas were in the pod. Do they all have three peas? Good question. I went to Sobeys and an investigation was under way.
The Super Kids tested their senses with a smell experiment and a tasting investigation. Dietary restrictions were taking into account and everyone was able to participate.
Chefs are scientists too! They use their senses when creating a new recipe and working in the kitchen. Food needs to look good, smell yummy, taste delicious, and feel right. We used our five senses when we create gluten free macaroons! Thanks to a Super Kid parent for the yummy recipe and guidance. We followed a recipe, took turns, used our developing senses vocabulary, and created a tasty treat.
Thanksgiving was last weekend. Many families celebrate the holiday with family, friends, and turkey! We read “A Plump and Perky Turkey” during our story time. The story is about a very clever turkey who doesn’t want to be eaten by the town on the holiday. He comes up with a clever plan to get away. The kids were given a STEM challenge to create a “turkey hideout” using the materials we have in our classroom. I explained that a turkey could be eaten any day not just on Thanksgiving so we had to create a hideout for him. First we learned about turkeys, turkey shelters on farms, and some fun facts with QR code videos. Then we took our new found knowledge, our turkey cut out to hide, and got to work.
Have you heard of the zones of regulation? Our class has been learning about our feelings, reactions, and strategies to cope through learning these zones. The Disney movie “Inside Out” explains these feeling so well. I use the characters from the movie to help explain the zones and the feeling in each. Below is a link we watched to help understand these feelings.
Next we looked at pictures and sorting the emotions the people were feeling into the zones.
With the understanding that we experience all of these feeling and it’s ok to, we then explored how we can be bucket fillers in our classroom. When a friend’s bucket is low what can do? When our bucket is low what can we do? We re-read “How Full Is Your Bucket For Kids” and read “Be Kind” to help direct our discussions. Below are links to an online version of these books.
Kindness spreads. Being kind to a friend has a reaction. We learned about the scientist Sir Isaac Newton and how he discovered that every action has an opposite reaction. An act of kindness can lead to another and another. The following inspiration video helped the class’ understanding. They loved it so much that they asked to watch it again at snack time!
How could we show our understanding? The day had been full of diving deeper into our emotions, kindness, and paying it forward. I challenged the class to create chain reactions. When one thing happens it caused something else.
Throughout the day we had calming movement breaks with the Go Noodle website. I’ve attached a few link below.
Have a wonderful weekend with your families. I’ll end our post with a line that I say to my students daily. “In a world where you can be anything…be kind.”